The Myrðaling

 

The Myrðaling
A Ghost Story

Cold across the portal

through the shadow of the veil

the child shivers at me

wild-walking the mirk.

She's thin as she'd never been

when she lay as she was left,
tiny feet kicking in a stiff skin wrap,
taller too than when her kicking stopped

alone in the bramble where the light broke

as the snow wound blue

around her like smoke.

Now she can walk miles

through the night from the black

back corners of the winter before

and after all things
for she's passed the rock door.

On the slaughtering shadow

that splits the soft loam

she blows like a seed that won't be sown

but must be milled on
the stone of years

with a river of bones.

She opens her mouth

and sings like the plague

for a name of her own

to give her a grave.

Take mine I say--it's all I have

for a night sister here in the dying year,
where we've gone too far

to turn around, where too soon
we eat the bread of the dead,
where spirit can weigh
as heavy as flesh when the veil falls away.

Then the moon-girl came out of her lost disguise;

I saw my twin smile, and close her eyes.

~October 2014

reposted October 2021 for Spooktacular Weekend

at earthweal Open Link

Process notes: In Scandanavian folklore, a myrðaling, (from Old Norse, 'myrða,' murder) or more properly, myling, was the ghost of a child killed by its mother in infancy, usually  the child of an unmarried woman, or of a poor family unable to provide for it, abandoned in some unfrequented place and forced to walk the earth seeking burial. The myling might appear and reveal the acts of its killer in a song, or call out for a name, when the hearer could save the spirit by saying "take mine' so that it might then rest in consecrated ground, (as in this poem) or it might vengefully possess the living, jumping on their backs and forcing the victim to carry them to a graveyard, growing heavier with each step. You can read more in this wikipedia article.

Image: The Strawberry Girl, 1777, by Joshua Reynolds

Public domain via wikiart.org

I have manipulated this image.

Will O The Wisp

 

 

 

 

 

 

Will O The Wisp

 

 I walk tonight

and wish to be

the burn in a lantern;

I walk tonight

in the darkness.

In the darkness

with a black moon

on a path you can't see,

in the darkness

following me.

 

Following me: all

 the days and the years

in bright dresses

swallowing Orion,

coming to me.

Coming to me

with the twist of a moon

gone black in the sky,

coming to me with

wishes and bones.

 

Wishes and bones

are all I am,

and lantern's burn.

Wishes and bones and

fire in darkness.

 

 

 

 

 October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: This isn't a form per se, tho it's something like second cousin once removed to a cascade. I just made it up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Deadlight, 2010 ©joyannjones 

Lantern photo via Sunday Muse   Fair Use

 

Mystery On The Blue Train

 

 

 

 

Mystery On The Blue Train

(a 55)

 

 

There's mystery on the blue train;

Poirot's perplexed

at passion, soft skin, desire.

There's a heart of fire

burning before the snow falls

in the cemetery-silence

that flies behind eyes

in wind that plays

dead jazz in the night

in love slung over the bar

that snaps like crisp hangman's rope

when the body drops.

 

 

 

 

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 linked to dVerse Poets

Open Link Night

 

 

 

 

A 55 for Friday, and the G-Man (Homage to Christie)

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Interior view of a party at Zelli's nightclub, 16 Rue Fontaine, Montmartre, Paris, 1920s Fair Use

First edition cover,Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928  via wikipedia   Fair use, Link

The Invisible Man

 

 

 

 

 

The Invisible Man

 

 

To know you is

to never know you, closed

in your dead moth coat,

last century's hat

and shades, mummy's face

empty when unwrapped as yesterday' cup,

all feeling spilled on ground that sucks it dry.

To know you is

to live life in the dark

to look but never

find, feeling forward,

reaching, slipping, hands

fumbling out to nothing as if I'm blind;

to know you is to know the mirror's lie.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Poetics

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poem is written in the duodora form. See above link for description.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Claude Raines as The Invisible Man, 1933    Public Domain

 

 

Dead Silent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dead Silent

 

 

 

 The buzz cut off in the flower's throat,

the crunch of green in the hornworm's jaw

gone, and that was the first silencing.

The roadrunner's raspy morning cough,

the thud and peep of the grey toad's hop

stopped, the second silencing.

The bagpipe gliss too high to hear

deep in the whales' wet meadowlands,

the third thing silenced.

Science sucked into apathy's muck,

sense and sanity duct-taped dead: 

the brutish silencing.

 

The white noise of fools, the grinder's carouse of greed

eating greed, the barker's pitch for fresh trash and blood

plays loudest where breathing is silenced.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Compound Word Verse

at dVerse Poets

and earthweal's

Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

gliss: abrv, glissando, a glide from one pitch to another

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wing Of A Blue Roller, 1512, Albrecht Durer   Public Domain

Untitled (Firetower) © Zdislas Beksinksi   Fair Use

Positions

 

 

 

 

 

Positions

 

 

You sleep flat in

the fire of all that was

and never burn;

ice doesn't.

I sleep on

the ashes; a body in

a prehistoric grave,

with stones, ivory rings

and broken pots,

curled tight to shield

all the soft things

that rot away.

 

 

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Quadrille Night

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Bronze Age Pot from prehistoric burial, Southern Urals © Finn Shrieber  from article 

Neolithic skeleton of a woman, from 4500 year old burial in Germany, by Archaeros, from article

 Fair Use

 

The Departing

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Departing

 

 

They met in meadowsweet and rue

when the moon began to sicken

when her breath began to thicken

when the golden note was stricken

from the songbird-ingenue.

 

The melancholy flies

buzzed the compass that was broken

ate the opium, her token

for a malady unspoken,

her copper curse of cries,

her pomegranate skies.

 

He held her hand again

though the remedy was shattered,

though all was lost that mattered,

tho someone's blood still splattered

as the now replaced the then

and the hand let go the pen.

 

All in white she'll be

when they walk to their last wedding,

when they meet what they've been dreading.

When last lustre becomes a leaden

shroud above the sea, there'll be

 only he.

 

 

 

 October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a second effort for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

Note: This poem was written with the aid of a word list I culled from Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher:

 

compass

lustre

pomegranate

shroud

rue

remedy

malady

melancholy

copper

opium eater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image via Sunday Muse, attribution unknown, Fair Use

Three Wheels

 

 

 

 

 

Three Wheels

 

 

 

I dream the ghost;

an old woman who sits staring,

tendril-wrapped in the cold wet

wood with her soft face

washed away.

 

I dream the ritual;

an old woman who pedals

fast, pedals frantic, hunched

simian over three thin wheels

meant for a child.

I see the flooding quarry

and what they dig there that

 must not be found. The old woman

pedals madly, seeing all that goes

around and round.

I dream the Völva;

a grey woman who throws back

her unmade face and howls in runes,

traveling Time with red eyes

she calls from night.

I hear the pack's full cry loping

as one; to rend, to tear, to save

the secret moon before

she can be dug

from the water and sold.

 

 

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

I have written this roughly in the cadralor form, tho I have taken a few liberties with it. 

 

 

 

Process Note: Völva: "A Völva is a female Shaman in Old Norse culture, religion, and mythology..A Völva practiced three different kinds of indigenous magic within Old Norse society: Seiðr, or shamanic ritual, was the ceremonial weaving of a new or different future..Spá, or prophecy, was the art of foreseeing the fates that were being continuously woven into existence by the Norns.. Galdr, or incantation, was the art of singing or chanting for the purposes of changing or influencing an outcome..." ~Shieldmaiden's Sanctum

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images, both via internet, attribution unknown.   Fair Use.

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

(a sonnet)

 

 

 

 

What gift could the dead of the living want

if not to pour again the living's light,

that whiskey warming throats of dreams they haunt;

to sing, to laugh, to lose their drowning night.

My dead are old yet various and new,

the dancing sparks of a youth that ran away.

The love we had so tenuous and blue

flickers out the past and so transforms the clay;

but when you come you paralyze the soul

with heart-remembered cold like glacier melt;

a frozen thing so trapped by pure control

will feel the same negation we once felt.

Take back the miseries living in your eye.

Don't bring me where the sun forgets the sky.

October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  (with apologies to Poe and the entire 19th Century)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 a little something for All Hallows, at dVerse Poets

Open Link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Images: Styx,  © Marius Lewandowski  Fair Use

Author and title unknown, via the internet.  Fair Use

 

 

Red Smoking Mirror

 

 

 

 

Red Smoking Mirror

 

 

 I.

 

That was a hell of a poem, that one.

Some captive of war, some harem

woman, spilled her guts to you

flayed away all her hide

to bare nerve.

You

picked it up and wore it

just like mine, our wrists flapping,

bloody faces making masks

for yours, cut lips singing

all your 

butcher's songs.

 

II.

It's plain I said, I need to make a pyre

of all these undead fears and burn them out.

Oh no, you said, there's never enough fire.

Make garments of your fears' flayed skins and shout,

for loving's a red coal beneath your feet

and being loved a poem you can't complete.

But I turned off that voodoo child advice

when I saw you line them up like bowling pins

for your mumbled brujeria to hypnotize.

I left; now all my words are my own sins,

 

spells of blood are broken for a price,

with ravensong in dreams and peace the prize.

 

 

 October 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Poetics

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

brujeria: (Spanish) witchcraft, sorcery, black magic

 

Process Note:" In Aztec mythology and religion, Xipe Totec [pictured at top] or ... Xipetotec  ("Our Lord the Flayed One") was a life-death-rebirth deity..[the god] was also known by various other names, including Tlatlauhca, Tlatlauhqui [or]Tezcatlipoca ("Red Smoking Mirror")... [he] is represented wearing flayed human skin, usually with the flayed skin of the hands falling loose from the wrists...Various methods of human sacrifice were used to honour this god. The flayed skins were often taken from sacrificial victims who had their hearts cut out..."~wikipedia

 

 

 

Image:Xipe Totec as depicted in the Codex Borgia, shown holding a bloody weapon and wearing flayed human skin as a suit.  via wikipedia    Fair Use

Red And Gold

 

 

 

 

 Red And Gold

I.

Under my feet bright bodies

of leaves, mast from the oak, crunch

of all the discards of summer, fire's coming

crackle; percussion accompaniment

to sweet smoke of raked heaps burning

where you stand smiling,

match in hand.

II.

Peridot green under amethyst clouds

the after-storm sun bent the grass back

with sudden heat, as you bent my bones

with one touch, onyx eyes

closing on summer's fire

while the last light left brushed the waterfall's

singing to red steam.

III.

Around my skin a white pelt of

frozen water, my remembering numbing as wind,

 howling hard as a cast-out wolf ten states

from its pack, too old to fight

too full not to cry,

 under a sharp sickle moon

that sees nothing at all.

IV.

Rolling wheels on warm red dirt

over the creek, around the bends where 

trees hide the climb, mask the descent,

 shaking their gravid buds in the rage of air

pushing me, pulling me,

past the point where words

could make me stop.

V.

Every season dies around me,

every leaf, every white-muzzled wolf

in my wilderness, each golden October

burning red under the match

til nothing is left but the journey

I reverse night

after night in my sleep.

October 2021

posted for Meet the Bar: Cadralor plus Nobel

at dVerse Poets

Images: Autumn Leaves, Lake George, NY, 1924 ©Georgia O'Keefe   Fair Use

Red Dirt Road After Spring Rain, author unknown, via internet.    Fair Use